Hacker Musings and OCD

Trying (again) to unwind myself from AAPL (and others)

Every so often I get sort of freaked out how deep I am in the Apple ecosystem.

The most often occurs when I want to replace a device, and the combination of “geeze that costs a LOT” and “at this point in time, Apple hardware is sort of shit” makes me think that it’s all a really bad idea and I should GTFO.

The answer is always … complicated.

For example, I still have precisely 0 interest in DIY. So while BitWarden seems as capable a password manager as 1Password, it seems like the only obvious thing to do is to host my own locker, or I’m just trading lock-in A for lock-in B. But I don’t want to DIY something that important, and even if I did, I’m just locking myself into AWS or whatever else I use to host it.

The second problem is as crappy as eg Photos is, gotta tell ya, most of the alternatives are pretty much even worse. The thing about any given Apple app is, most of the bad press is when it first comes out. Photos was monstrous garbage. Lately, though, it’s really a generally OK-if-not-good-enough consumer-grade app. I’m not angry at Photos, the point of the exercise is “everything is locked up in one place and that’s scary”.

So unwinding myself from all this is tedious and there’s no great answers. And every day that goes by is another day I just dive deeper into FruitCo.

(Also no, I’ll never use Android, Android is bad and you should feel bad.)

Further complicating is that Apple might get its shit together and release some non-awful computers. Due this year are, if I recall correctly, the new Mac Pro desktops, and probably some upgrades to the line overall. So maybe it won’t be so bad? Maybe?

Success on the social media front is heartening, though. I’ve gotten rid of Slack, I’m mostly not using Instagram, and I only use Twitter via the web, which is so generally awful that it restricts use. I am desperately trying to use this blog more and am once again trying out Micro.blog.

I started using Flickr again but the public feed looks like a bunch of Very Serious photographers and not pictures of people’s lunch, which is about all I use it for when I’m not on vacation or camping or whatever. So I don’t expect I’ll get a lot of “likes” but as Insta is now pretty much “stealth Facebook”, I should get the fuck off it.

The bottom line, is that DIY remains hard even for a seasoned technologist. It’s a matter of time and effort I don’t always have. That sort of sucks.